President Barack Obama talked about renewable fuels a lot on the campaign trail, among them cellulosic ethanol, an advanced biofuel that uses organic waste, such as wood chips and grasses, to make energy.
 
The fuel is arguably cleaner than corn ethanol, which can be land- and fossil fuel-intensive, so Obama is trying to expand the nation's renewable fuel portfolio.
 
Already, between funding from the stimulus package to advance the market and grants from the Department of Energy, Obama has made some headway in promoting the alternative fuel.
 
Perhaps his biggest push, however, came in May 2009, when Obama announced that he would expand the Renewable Fuel Standard, an existing mandate that requires gasoline to be blended with ethanol or diesel with biodiesel, from 9 billion gallons of blended fuel to 36 billion gallons by 2022. He also said he would expand the requirement to include cellulosic ethanol. For example, by 2016, gasoline will be blended with 4.25 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol and that amount would increase to 5.5 billion gallons in 2017.
 
That said, the updated rule would require only 1 billion gallons of the fuel by 2013. Not until 2015 would the cellulosic mandate exceed 2 billion gallons, according to the notice of proposed rulemaking on the Environmental Protection Agency Web site.
 
So, Obama has fallen 1 billion gallons short of his goal of creating 2 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2013. But the updated renewable fuels standard is not yet on the books. In the meantime, he has clearly lived up to his promise of investing federal resources into developing cellulosic ethanol. We'll keep an eye on this pledge, but for now, we'll move it to In the Works.